We have heard about some IP law changes in Spain, as well as other changes, that have been passed by the right party majority of the Spanish congress but we haven’t figured out yet what those changes will do to us as IP users and IP professionals.
These changes will take place on January the 1st 2015 and we are going to focus on two of the biggest issues already mentioned and published. The first one of those issues is the internet law that forbids all the web sites to facilitate the description of works and services that are offered unauthorized, which is why some known pages such as series.ly or seriesyonkis.com were shut down and all their links were removed. The punishment for having those links on your web page would be to remove them for the first time, but if you upload them again you could get a 600.000 € fine. Is this new measure good for the IP industry? It depends, because for now the IP law will not prosecute users directly, which would probably make no sense, but it does prosecute those who share content without financial gain. And here is where the second issue arises.
The problem with the new IP law is that the uploaded content must charge its use even if the author doesn’t want to charge for it. This leads us to GoogleNews. As soon as the congress passed this new law Google announced that GoogleNews would not comply with those new rules and therefore it will be shut down. GoogleNews has a full explanation of their reasons which are mainly based on the free will of the authors to share their contents with whoever they want to and upload it on their web sites and blogs. We don’t know the consequences this decision will involve yet but since Spain is the first and only country where Google has taken action we can expect a bad result out of this.
In conclusion, as IP professionals and citizens we believe IP laws should help not only the countries and their development but also authors and inventors since they are the ones that create content in order to improve our future.
Hopefully we will learn from our mistakes and maybe in a near future we will be able to amend them.
WISHES YOU ALL A HAPPY NEW YEAR!
